Charles Hoskinson is pushing back against people who doubt the future of Cardano, a fully open-source and decentralized public blockchain.
“I guess some people would just like to pay attention to fake news. They’d like to pay attention to the latest sycophant or provocateur of the week, and they don’t seem to understand that these are among the most complicated of protocols to implement.”
In an ask-me-anything session on YouTube, the Cardano creator defends the project and its development, saying 200 people are currently working on the platform with 100 specifically focused on its native cryptocurrency, ADA. Hoskinson explains that the protocols are written from scratch and are based upon peer-reviewed research.
“There is no code we can copy, there is no source base to fork from, and we’re doing very hard things. And when you do very hard things based upon science and it’s new, occasionally you have issues.”
Earlier this year, IOHK, the blockchain research and development company behind Cardano, rolled out the launch of the Shelley testnet, the first step in creating a network that Hoskinson says is “50-100 times more decentralized than other large blockchain networks” such as Bitcoin.
According to Hoskinson, IOHK CEO, the testnet has been successful.
“We are already getting overwhelming participation with the network to testnet, which is another thing that was just apparently totally missed by the FUD media, and we have almost 100 stake pools running on that…
The project is going well. We’re not missing deadlines. We know what we’re doing, and you can publicly see that on the GitHub. There are more commits with our project than any other cryptocurrency project on market.
The credentials and qualifications of our engineers are clear, and it’s clear to see the quality of the software, as evidenced by the fact that 13-year-old children in Wyoming were able to get stake nodes running on Raspberry Pis.”
Hoskinson, a co-creator of Ethereum, also took a moment to clear up his corporate history, after a viewer said they were confused why he had been “fired so many times.”
“I have not been. I took a buyout with Bitshares cause I couldn’t work with Dan [Larimer]. As for Ethereum, that story’s very clear: It was either for-profit or not-for-profit. They decided to go not-for-profit, and seven of the eight founders are no longer there at Ethereum. Only one is, Vitalik [Buterin].
The rest all went off and did what I did and created their own company… some of these companies are competing with that very project. My entire argument was that if we didn’t put golden handcuffs on people, they wouldn’t stick around. And we didn’t, so I was right.”